Jason Isbell was only just recently in the New Orleans area – playing the Best of the Bayou festival in Houma the last weekend of September, and before that in April, speaking at the Experience Music Project pop music conference at Tulane University – but he doesn’t mind circling back to town. Like any frequent visitor to the city, he has his list of must-do’s, and must-eat’s, to tick off.

“I like any excuse to come to this city,” he said, amiably, over the phone on a recent afternoon. “I like to go to Dick and Jenny’s and eat the bouillabaisse, and I like to go to Café Atchafalaya and eat the shrimp and grits. I like to go to the little cookbook shop in the Quarter and buy cookbooks. I’m a walk-around-and-look-at-things kind of person. And now I can remember where the hotel is, since I’m not drinking.”

“Southeastern,” Isbell’s newest album, is a significant mile marker for the 34-year-old songwriter. It’s his first project since getting sober, and, not only that, it also is his first since his second marriage, to musician Amanda Shires (“I went in and did some overdubs after the wedding, right before I went on my honeymoon,” he said), and its songs deal with both sea changes in his life.

The country-rock singer and guitarist already has been cheered as one of the keenest young songwriters working in the United States today, both for a memorable stint in the Drive-By Truckers in the early years of the 21st century and for three subsequent, critically well-received albums with his own band, the 400 Unit. “Southeastern,” released in June, is Isbell’s highest-charting album to date, with a debut at No. 23 on the Billboard 200, and easily the most celebrated thus far in his career. It’s landed him on the cover of American Songwriter magazine, features on NPR and in the New York Times, and appearances at Lincoln Center and on “Late Night With David Letterman,” not to mention a sold-out night at the storied Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn.

That storm of publicity throws the recent shifts in Isbell’s personal life squarely into the spotlight’s glare. The story of redemptive love and a new leaf turned is, to be sure, an eye-catching narrative on which to hang a record release, but it also places in the public eye two things – fresh sobriety, a new marriage – arguably best nurtured in private.

“It’s not always the easiest thing,” Isbell said. “But it’s funny to me when people say ‘You’re going to be embarrassed down the line,’ by talking about your sobriety or talking about your marriage. I think if anyone’s ever been through the process of recovering from alcoholism, they understand you can’t really embarrass an alcoholic. You have to get rid of that before you can actually quit drinking. So I’m not afraid. I’m a little bit afraid, but you can’t be brave without being a little bit afraid. So I’m going to go ahead and tell people how my life is going. It’s mine and I own it. If you’re going to make art, that’s very different from trying to make entertainment. And I’m not trying to make entertainment.”

“Southeastern” is not a coy album. Not all its stories are first-person, but its feelings are raw, intimate and fully exposed: It holds little back, from the breathless, blackly comic lost-weekend roadhouse rocker “Super 8” (with its refrain “I don’t want to die in a Super 8 motel”) to “Cover Me Up,” a tender song of hard-won love. Even the record’s cover art – a stark, black-and-white full-frontal face shot, staring into the camera with an expression somewhere between defiance and uncertainty – is vulnerable, but unflinching.

Jason Isbell

What: Country-rock singer-songwriter touring in support of his most acclaimed album to date, the June 2013 release “Southeastern.”

“I signed up for it,” he said. “If you give people pieces of yourself as you go, then you wind up playing to audiences that are very similar to you, and they don’t ever turn their back on you. With some artists that wind up in the pop world and the pop country world, and are very open-minded people - like the Dixie Chicks, for example - I think they were selling records to a whole lot of people that weren’t anything like them, and then, when they finally spoke their mind, people were shocked. And they turned their back on them. I’d rather perform for people that are very similar to me, and the best way to do that is tell them what you’re like, what your life is like.”

“Also,” he said, “if it doesn’t scare you a little bit, you’re not doing it right. You can hear Leonard Cohen’s life in his songs, Bob Dylan’s life in his songs. If you want to go back to the blues, ask Willie Dixon what’s going on and he’s not afraid to tell you.”

“So I think it’s kind of B.S. if you don’t want to tell people what’s personal to you, and what’s private.”